The Languages of the Rights of Man

Philippe Beneton

Those who once spoke, or who speak, the language of the rights of man
make up a most varied group: Jefferson and Mounier, Robespierre and Saint
Just; Roosevelt but also Vyshinsky; John Paul II and Ronald Dworkin. Which
is to say, this language has been used in a whole assortment of ways. Thus
if the notion of the rights of man has become the hallmark of modern ethical
theory and liberal politics, it is nevertheless a confused notion. There
were, there are, different languages of the rights of man, and these languages
must first of all be distinguished one from the another.

To begin with, the rights of man were officially consecrated by the
Americans and the French at the end of the eighteenth century. These rights,
which did in fact open the era of modern politics, nevertheless remain
difficult to interpret. Jacques Maritain, for example, or John Finnis see
in them a progress in recognition and understanding of the natural law-modern
rights prolonging classical natural law. Others, men like Leo Strauss or
Ernest Fortin, claim that these modern natural rights represent a fundamental
rupture with the tradition of classical natural law.

The difficulty here is clearly related to the equivocal, or downright
indeterminate, use of terms. The eighteenth-century texts declare that
men are endowed with equal rights and an equal right to liberty. In France,
this formulation did, to be sure, sound the deathknell of the ancien regime,
but the question remains of how to interpret such a formulation from the
perspective of the history of natural right. In schematic terms, one can
sketch two competing interpretations.

In the first view, this formulation of equality marks a progress in
bringing to light the natural order. From antiquity down to the modern
era, all societies were in fact governed by the principle of aristocracy,
by which some have by nature-that is to say, from birth-the right to command
others (ancient "democracy" was itself qualified in this way).
The recognition against this aristocratic principle of an original and
fundamental equality among men lies within the dynamics of Christian equality;
it is inseparable from evangelical ferment.

The second interpretation, however, states that the modern idea of
rights represents a genuine rupture with Christianity, because modern equality
is not the same as Christian equality. According to the Christian idea
of equality, men have in common the same filiation and the same vocation;
according to the modern version of equality, that which men have in common
is the right to pursue different ends, to have nothing in common except
this right. The equality of sovereign individuals is not the equality of
children of God.

So which interpretation should be adopted? Such questions are of course
complicated; each way of looking at the interpretation of equality undoubtedly
contains its own part of the truth. And because of the various influences
that came together in the composition of both the French and the American
declarations, we can see simultaneously the effects of a Christian context
and of non-Christian and even anti-Christian ideas. It is also the case
that the authors of these texts did not themselves always mean the same
things by the same formulation: the declarations were no less ambiguous
at the time of their composition than they are today.

Nevertheless, it seems correct to say that the dominant note was that
of rupture. Historically, the birth of the "rights of man" is
tied to a transformation of the conception of politics: classical politics
had attached itself to the promotion of the rules of life, whereas
modern politics in its liberal version limits itself to establishing the
rules of the game. For classical natural law (from Aristotle to
Saint Thomas), man is animated by a vocation and politics has for its end
the accomplishment of that human vocation. Politics is at the service of
the good life, of the bona vita multitudinis. In this perspective,
classical natural law insists, above all, on the duties of man.

What characterizes modern political thought is the rejection of the
bona vita as a guide to political action. Men either lack such a
thing as a natural vocation or at least they disagree about what such a
vocation consists in. This makes it necessary to rethink politics, to begin
with men as they are and to arrange things in order that those who are
divided about the issue of what constitutes the good life will nevertheless
live together in peace.

The work of modern thought, pioneered by Machiavelli, followed by Hobbes
and followed still further by Locke, results in the liberal, that is, a
procedural, solution: the duties of man are effaced in favor of their rights;
the rules of life, in favor of the rules of the game-rules that must allow
men who differ to pursue their own individual interests, each in his own
way. The rights of man are a key part of the modern liberal promise: that
each man be guaranteed individual liberty, civil peace, and comfort.

To begin with, the liberal solution was a moderate, a temperate, one.
In fact, for Locke or for the French liberals or for the American founders,
the objective was clearly the establishment of a new political order on
the basis of the rights of the individual and the free pursuit of his interest;
nevertheless, for these thinkers it was obvious that such principles would
be limited by such moderating influences as family, education, and religion
(illustrations of this recognition can be found in Locke's Some Thoughts
Concerning Education or in Washington's Farewell Address). The
bona vita was to be excluded from politics, but there remained traditional
rules about how to live properly, and with honor. Equal liberty was to
exist within certain limits originally laid down by Christian morality.

But the liberal forefathers had not been conscious of the fact that
they were creating a time-bomb. To begin with the individual and his rights,
renouncing the idea of a human vocation, is to set in motion a process
that leads to the limitless sovereignty of the individual, unbound by ties
to nature and natural morality. In other words, Christian thought had been
saying: "These are your duties and God help you," and by now
contemporary thought is saying: "These are your rights and the devil
take care of you" (que le diable t'emporte).

This evolution was, of course, not a straightforward development from
one point to another. Thus the French Revolution proclaimed the rights
of man but almost from the beginning did not respect its own universalist
principles. In June 1793-to take only one example-after their victory over
the Girondins, the Jacobins wrote a new Declaration of Rights in which,
at the very moment they were engaged in a systematic campaign of terror,
they reaffirmed the principles of individual liberty and the right to resist
oppression. It would, however, be wrong to see this as some kind of contradiction
between discourse and practice. There was no contradiction because in Jacobin
usage the term the "rights of man" had simply come to signify
something else. The French Revolution had from the start put forward two
distinct sets of principles, the universalist principles and the ideological
ones. And almost immediately, the latter subverted the former. Whether
in 1789 or in 1793, the patriotes were saying two different things
at the same time: first, that all men are free and equal, and sovereignty
belongs to the Nation or to the Peuple; and second, that
there are two types of men, Good ones and Bad ones, the Good ones being
the Peuple or the amis de la liberte, the Bad ones being
the ennemis du Peuple or the contre- revolutionnaires. In
other words, "liberty for all" but "no liberty for the enemies
of liberty." "We are brothers," but, as Chamfort once ironically
put it, "Be my brother or I will kill you." Robespierre's famous
formula of the "despotism of liberty" against tyranny would be
a contradiction in terms if in his mouth liberty was not once and for all
incarnated in a given ideological camp-the camp of liberty enjoying the
complete liberty to suppress the liberty of those who do not agree. The
ideology says that politics is war between two camps, that of the good
and that of the wicked. Good and Evil are no longer matters of degree,
but are attached to the essence of beings, on one side the patriotes,
the peuple-on the other the ennemis du peuple, the suppots
du despotisme. And by this Manichean dualism the rights of man are
subverted.

The same logic was at work in the politics of V. I. Lenin. For Lenin,
social life had to be understood entirely in terms of the "class struggle,"
that radical and irremediable battle pitting the "bourgeoisie"
against the "proletariat." There is no third party, no intermediate
situation, and no universalist perspective. Liberty, asked Lenin, means
liberty for whom-that of the oppressors or that of the oppressed? Justice
is justice for whom? etc. Liberty, equality, and justice are transformed
and denatured by the one true perspective, the perspective of class.

There is not, then, as many for a long time have sought to suggest,
an ideological version of the rights of man-a Jacobin version, a Leninist
version-that competes with interpretation of the liberal version. There
is a liberal version of the rights of man and an ideological subversion
of the rights of man.

Leaving aside those dramatic periods of ideological domination, what
was going on in the West with respect to the rights of man? Actually, we
can distinguish two lines of evolution, one in which the modern liberal
promise has been kept, and one in which the logic of that promise has accelerated
out of control-or, in other words, in which the time-bomb has exploded.

The liberal promise has surely been kept: men have won civil peace,
public liberties, and comfort. Life has become safer, life has become softer.
This promise was to be sure not a Christian one-"For what does it
profit a man if he gains the whole world and suffers the loss of his soul?"
(Matthew 16:26) Nevertheless, there is of course a good side to this modern
success: scientific and economic progress have permitted the great majority
of men to accede to the material sufficiency that St. Thomas said is a
precondition for virtue. In many ways technological progress has been useful
for everyone; even the most conservative of the conservatives are not reluctant
to use the airplane, listen to classical records, or seek the comfort of
aspirin. In the political domain, too, the liberal West is able to boast
of real success. The conduct of domestic politics is no longer a dangerous
business-no one risks his life in it. The rights of man have played and
still play a significant role in domesticating political power. And liberal
democracy has granted to those who do not like such democracy the liberty
of saying what they think.

But there is another side to the story. In seeking what Hobbes called
the "delightful life" rather than the good life or the bona
vita, in carrying the idea of individual rights to its extreme, the
Western societies have tended to be subverted by their own principles.
The rights of man were born in a world shaped by Christianity and even
if they became detached from Christian doctrine, for a long time the root
connections were not broken. The tempest of the sixties has changed all
that; everything was swept up in its force. The idea of the sovereignty
of the individual along with the principles of liberty and equality were,
and have remained, completely radicalized. In Le Cid of Corneille,
Rodigue says to Chimene in a perfect Alexandrine: "j'ai fait ce
que j'ai du, je fais ce que je dois" ("I did what I should,
I do what I must"). Contemporary man says: "I do what I want,
no one is better than I," or, more precisely: "Each of us is
sovereign, each is equal to everyone else; I live as I want and my way
of life is equal to everyone else's."

The contemporary language of human rights effaces natural distinctions-
between the sexes, the ages, gifts, and capacities-and rejects all moral
authority and all hierarchy concerning the way to live. "The great
problem for man," said Jacques Maritain, "is that of finding
oneself a master." The contemporary mind replies: "To find oneself
a master is to break with equality, with the sovereignty of the individual;
each must be self-sufficient." The world of today is a world where
the language of moral authority ("You should") tends to efface
itself. It is impolite to say, "You should"; it is necessary
to say, "I prefer." Or to put it another way, it is bad to defend
the idea of the good.

This evolution has had the effect of emptying the notion of the universality
of the rights of man of all meaning. Men are all similar but they no longer
have anything in common, except this equal liberty devoid of all substance.
They have nothing in common except the right to have nothing in common.

Modern equality, then, is not a substantial equality but only
a formal one. The first is grounded in the recognition of what is
human, the second is founded on the claim that nothing is specifically
human. In the first case, another person is equal to me because we share
something that distinguishes us as human beings. In the case of merely
formal equality, another person is equal to me because he cannot be more
human, i.e., better than I. This latter view of equality reduces the universality
of rights to simple issues of procedure. Rights, that is, lose all ties
with nature and hence their very foundation. How can anyone speak of what
constitutes the dignity of man when there are no criteria for distinguishing
dignified from undignified conduct? How can we speak of the rights of man
when we no longer know what man is?

The kind of formal equality that prevails today transforms the nature
of the relationships among men. As Tocqueville pointed out, the modern
sentiment of equality separates men from one another: because each man
is his own master, any inequalities become purely contractual and functional
and do not extend to anyone's way of living. No one is responsible for
anyone else; the true idea of education is undermined; and relationships
become functional, abstract, and cold. The contemporary idea of equality
is not mutual recognition; it is much more a matter of self-affirmation
and mutual indifference. And each man is invited to live just this way,
so each man wants to be his own master precisely in order to do as everyone
else does. The consequence is that modern man is an isolated being; he
is a traveler without a compass, the "sovereign of his own misfortune,"
as Lammenais said.

As we know, the language of the rights of man was born outside the Roman
Church and to some extent in opposition to it; and for a long time this
language remained foreign to the Church's discourse. Things have changed
since the early 1940s. Pius XII and his successors-most particularly John
Paul II-have to some extent embraced the rights of man in order to insert
them into Christian doctrine. Not that the change has been substantial:
the magisterium continues to condemn philosophical liberalism, and its
version of the rights of man does not imply any surrender to modern principles
insofar as they are incompatible with Christianity. The contrast between
the discourse of John Paul II and the dominant discourse of our day, namely,
that of extreme liberalism, is particularly blatant. In schematic terms,
this contrast can be expressed as follows: the discourse of John Paul II
attaches itself to the condition of the good life, whereas extreme liberalism
entails the temptation to live badly; the former defines, in addition to
formal rights, some substantial rights linked to the human vocation, while
the latter limits itself to formal rights devoid of all idea of the bona
vita and extends them to more deviant behavior. The first discourse
reattaches the rights of man to the rights of God, and the second makes
man instead a petty divinity. The rights of man in their Christian version
are good because they are at the service of the Good; the rights of man
in their contemporary radical version are good because they are not at
the service of the Good (in this understanding it is bad to consecrate
the Good because each is the measure of his own good).

The Pope expressed these concerns with particular clarity in a 1991
address to a meeting of European Christian Democrats:

In fact there exists a temptation today to establish democracy as a
moral relativism which goes so far as to reject all certitude about the
meaning of human life and dignity, about human rights and fundamental human
duties. When this sort of mentality takes hold, sooner or later democracies
undergo a moral crisis. Relativism impedes the exercise of the necessary
discernment between various demands which are expressed at the root of
society: between good and evil. A society's life depends on decisions which
must presuppose a firm moral conviction. When there is no more trust in
the very value of the human person, one loses sight of what motivates the
nobility of democracy; it is there ready to give way to various forms of
corruption and manipulation of its institutions.

The discourse of extreme liberalism, then, is very misleading. In order
to avoid being trapped by it, one must as a first step embrace the two
following ideas on the basis of the natural law:

First, no formal right is an absolute. "Liberty is indivisible,
unconditional," says the modern mind. But must one truly allow men
to drug themselves, to make chemical weapons in their kitchens, to appeal
to racial hatred, to distribute cocaine in the elementary schools? "Equality
is universally valuable," the dominant language implies. But it is
after all necessary to see both sides of this question. On the one hand,
men are equal above all because they all share the same nature and the
same condition, i.e., for reasons that give substance to equality. On the
other hand, they are obviously unequal in a multiplicity of ways. They
are at the same time fundamentally equal and powerfully unequal. It is
necessary to preserve both the sense of equality and, when it touches on
the question of what constitutes human excellence, the perception of inequality.
In a sense, Pascal is not the equal of Bouvard and Pecuchet (the embodiments
of human silliness in Flaubert's novel), nor is Madame de Merteuil (the
heroine of Les Liaisons Dangereuses) the equal of Mother Teresa.

Second, formal rights are to be subordinated to a sober view of the
human vocation. This human vocation is of course a matter of dispute, but
natural reason-the inclinatio naturalis of St. Thomas- permits us
to draw some lines. It is not a question of imposing the bona vita
by constraint-virtue presupposes liberty to choose virtue-it is a question
of limiting and containing the propaganda of the mala vita (for
example, pornography). The only solution is to grope for a point of equilibrium
between liberty and virtue. Indeed, formal rights correctly understood
(that is, between limits established by respect for the dignity and the
vocation of men) have their own value. This value is obvious when the rights
of man are opposed to a tyrannical power. They translate what is the great
success of liberal modern regimes: the domestication of the Minotaur.

To the question, "What does the economy economize?", Sir
Dennis H. Robertson once made the lapidary response, "love."
The market economy does not need love to work well. To the question, "What
do the rights of man, in the contemporary version, economize?", the
response is equally, "love." A society based on the formal rights
of man does not need love.

The present epoch is one characterized by a procedural rationalization
of a world where the divorce between law and nature, reason and life, knowledge
and faith, society and friendship, is clearly manifest. Modern society
is made for men who do not love each other. But what happens to a society
without a sense of community? Besides, even if society does not need love,
men, in fact, do.

Philippe Beneton is Professor of Political
Science at the University of Rennes in France. The author is greatly indebted
to Professor Daniel Mahoney of Assumption College for his comments on the
manuscript and for his helpful assistance in writing this text in English.